Chalk Farm to Belsize Park
— 1991 —
Then practice losing farther, losing faster
Elizabeth Bishop
At sixteen, the game was well crafted. By day I was a school prefect. The teacher’s favourite, the bereaved child who never stopped smiling. I was the girl who was chosen to read Edith Sitwell poems in assembly, who was placed next to the guest speakers, who looked after the juniors, the girl who always got full marks and scholarships, the girl who knew the textbooks inside and out. And so, I was a textbook example of what can go wrong when a parent dies. It was as if I’d gone through the manual of high-risk behaviour in adolescence, picking a choice selection of the best entries. Behind the good school grades was something quite different. After finishing my homework, I changed out of my school uniform, took my cigarettes out of my art box, and headed back down the Northern Line.
And so it goes. The one who ran the Dungeons and Dragons shop. The one outside the pub. The one who turned up in our school common room and didn’t go away. The one who ran the second-hand bookshop where I worked, and where we turned the sign to closed and lay down on the floor in his back office. The one I met in the cinema. The one behind the skip. The one with a cucumber. The ones in Highgate Cemetery after dark. The one by Camden canal. The one on the pile of coats at a party. Halfway to Nottingham, the one on the train.
Usually they were one-day stands. Nights were too hard to explain, but on afternoons I could do it and get back without having to say where I’d been. It was enough to say I was out. I approached the entire business as a challenge to myself, channelling Thoreau via Dead Poets Society. This was how to live completely. To suck out all the marrow of life. I was less a sort of service provider than a person with a compulsion, my body split into two parts. It was a numbers game. A weekend wasn’t, in my eyes, a success unless I had got off with someone, and the higher the risk, the higher the score. Underground, anything is permitted. Overground too. One summer afternoon a man took me back to his caravan on a building site. A woman sat near a hob, shaking. He gave the woman something, and then she left. We lay together on the bed shelf. The blankets smelled of dog.
The game often took me back to Belsize Park, near my old school, just so that I could walk the same streets. I loved looking at the names of the stations, the ones that I’d looked at with my father as a child. Walking down the high street, past the snack van and the heath, just so that I could hang around those pavements, smoking Camel Lights in their blue packet, trying to turn back time, or fight against it.
Nothing that happened with these men or boys gave me much in the way of pleasure. Pleasure wasn’t part of the story that I was writing for myself, or part of the game I was playing. It may or may not be a mere detail to add that I would agree to do everything and anything but, a caveat that often left me on my knees on a pavement or path. I never fully articulated why, but it had something to do with emptiness, and a little to do with control. I would lose nearly everything but my virginity. When I walk down the street the scent of a Callery pear catches in my throat.
Some might say all this riskiness is a kind of death wish. Part of a mindset for those people who resist life, who chase the end of the tunnel, who want the story to end. But for me, the creation of this double life, the seeking and searching after multiple stories, has always been about life – not death. It’s always been an attempt to create more – to feel more, not less, alive. The joy of being an athlete of the clock, bending odd hours into an unprecedented and unsuspected second life. A warding off of the devouring gray sensation of time. It comes from a positive hunger, not negative doubt – and it brings with it the fiction of abundance, or the fiction of more of life’s stories.
I still on occasions cross that stretch of London, but I’m not quite sure what I’m looking for. Those roads have become lined with death, and pain, and life, and love, and strange loops of time – they still haunt me, as if they hold the answer. The ground can become layered with the stories we have lived. The topography of nearlys.
I even went back to the hospice. Waiting outside for a while, on the other side of the road, until I got tired of being stared at by the people coming in and out of the nearby flats. A forty-year-old woman with bad hair and red eyes, standing staring at a concrete block. But perhaps, when you live opposite a hospice, you get used to that kind of thing. That pavement full of teary bodies leaning on lamp posts.
I stood outside the sliding security doors, and they zapped me in. I knew that I’d start crying the moment I opened my mouth. The kind man on the door took one look at my face and ushered me into the ‘Quiet Room’. I told him my story. The short version.
My father died here. In 1988.
The man went to get me some tissues.
It’s hard to pin down the particular quality of feeling created by the palliative care decorative vibe. While it can’t be timeless, hospice chic does have its own kind of classic status: standing in that room, it could have been any time between the 1980s and now. The purple carpet, two chairs placed on either side of a low table, on which was perched a large piece of curved bark. On the back wall there was a sideboard decorated with a pot plant called ‘Decorum’, a bowl full of stones and marbles, and a cardboard box for prayer requests, wrapped in yellow paper. A circular piece of stained glass on the far wall created a window that led to nowhere. And three pictures of flowers were hung just a little too high up, squashed under a window frame. It’s not surprising that such rooms feel painfully sad, but there is a further sense of heroic sadness there – something to do with these ownerless objects, placed so carefully by an unknown hand, hoping to offer some comfort to others.
The man came back with a pile of tissues. He showed me the books of remembrance, placed on stands on the table in the corner. Perhaps you’ll find him there, he said. I liked the euphemism. Perhaps I would. I looked through the lists of names. Death after death, day after day, before realising that they only went back to 1994. I would never find my father in that book. But I didn’t want to leave that space. When I did, I asked the kind man where the chapel of rest used to be. I wanted to know where I had been standing when I last saw my father. Where in the building had I seen him lying, so still, so laid out, so palely dead? The man gestured back to the Quiet Room. We converted it, he said, to make it less denominational. I walked out of the hospice, reimagining the room in the light of this knowledge. The shape of my father’s body hovered over the pine table. His head superimposed on the paper lantern floor lamp. His feet rested on a purple plaid chair.
A lamp. A table. A chair. Objects help mourning. They give something to hold on to, to reflect on. A talismanic effect, if they have been held by the lost person. Perhaps they will in some way allow a way back. But there was so little left that ever belonged to my father. Soon after he died, the folded wheelchair went back to the hospital. Next went the empty briefcase – the black Civil Service bag that he carried to the job he hated but worked at to pay the bills. I asked to keep it, but my mother said they would need it returned. As I think back, that bag was a symbol of almost everything my father stood for: his determination, his resignation, his containment. The compartmentalised life, neatly divided for paper and pens, and a packet of Salt ’n’ Shake crisps, with their own individualised sachet of salt. The briefcase sat in the corner for a month or two, propped up against the standard lamp, and conjured up the emptiness that comes from being told at thirty-five that you are going to die. Then living like that for a decade, as you watch your children grow, knowing you will never see them grow up.
Bit by bit, my father’s clothes disappeared. First from the wardrobe, then the drawers. The last items were put into the bedbox in the spare room and then vanished. So did his camera. His records. It wasn’t a deliberate act of clearance. We just had moths. Or damp. Or paying guests. And as we moved, they moved. Things were rearranged, got lost. Ended up in the skip or the dump, or maybe in a filing cabinet.
One day, perhaps a y
ear after his death, I remember looking on the bookshelf near the French windows and finding a small silver box that looked like a Walkman. It was near the same shelf that we used to keep my father’s laxatives and tissues, next to the bed that we had brought downstairs when the stairs became too hard to climb. I pressed play. Breaking the quiet of the afternoon, my father spoke. I dropped the machine and listened until my tears came – first silently, then so loud they hurt, drowning out the sound of the dictated letters, in all their blank, neutral precision.
The loss of a voice is one of the saddest of losings. Perhaps this is why the recorded voice feels so painful. It is a lasting thing, which captures something that cannot last. And what is lost is so private and yet so public. A voice belongs to us, as well as to its speaker, or at least to the air in between. Voices are personal in the way a favourite perfume is personal. They have different scents on different pulses. The air vibrates the vocal folds, shortening, bulging, pulsing, modifying, resonating. They come, they go. The way we hear other people is part of the language of love, our listening for their pauses, the particular way they blur their ‘r’s when they get excited, or the way tiredness makes every word minutely, subtly, clipped.
Gradually, I got used to the disappearing stuff, numbed to it, as I numbed myself to his going. Sometimes it felt as if so many things were gone that I wasn’t sure if he’d ever really existed at all. There is something about childhood bereavement, at least as I know it, that has placed me slantways to loss. The thing about having stuff, like handbags, or mementos, or fathers, is that you might lose them.
Mostly, I just lose smaller things. Keys. Money. Glasses. The art of losing, Elizabeth Bishop calls it. You start with a pen, and before you know it, realms of loss lie before you, piled-up absences of things that were. You get replacements. You buy cheap and often. You lie about what you lost. You pretend you never cared. You lose things on purpose, as if it’s your special skill.
Most lost objects are within an eighteen-inch radius of where you last remember having them. Most, but not all. In the finding, you need to remember that it is you that is lost, not the thing.
Stuff that I have lost over the years (that I’d quite like back)
Most of my childhood books, especially the copy of Treasure Island
An opal that my uncle gave me, mined in Australia
A black leather jacket, left on a coat-hook in a club
A purse (snatched in St Petersburg railway station last year)
About seventy-eight earrings, including a really nice pair I bought last month
An irreplaceable copy of Madame Bovary that belonged to a boyfriend’s best friend
My father’s glasses
My father
The exact memory of your face
You
I often lose at Paddington. It’s because it used to have a very large ladies toilet, on Platform One, and if you’re not a Londoner and are going to a party or an important meeting, then it’s a good place to get changed. There’s a huge counter, where you can do your make-up, and about seven full-length mirrors so you can take as long as you like in there without getting in someone else’s way. But this means that I tend to unpack my entire handbag, and extra bags, and then realise I’m late and run, leaving something behind.
I went down to Lost Property once, to try to find a pair of boots I’d left after one particularly quick change. After filling in the form at the office, and leaving it at the counter, I stood on the pavement, looking at the stuff they kept in the window.
It was a museum of loss. Each object bearing a neat yellow label with its model number and place of finding. There were four mobile phones. One from 2009 that had been found at Bank, a flip-open model found in 1993 in Chalk Farm, and one the size of a large rodent from 1988 that had been left in Marylebone. Above them was a shelf of cameras. A 1997 Fujifilm, a 2000 Minolta, and some beautiful ones from the seventies that you would have loved. A 1970 Leyton, along with a film canister found on the Holloway Road. Ranged along the bottom shelf, a series of LPs and singles. ABBA, Mann Made, John Lee Hooker. Lionel Bart’s Oliver! was propped in the corner, holding his bowl out. Orphaned objects, silent witnesses to incompetence, drunkenness, absent-mindedness, hurry, self-sabotage, carelessness, worry, lateness. Or to panic, depression, passion, giddy excitement, religious devotion, charitable intentions, confusion. All we know is they have been abandoned. There are so many losers, so many reasons for losing. But if it keeps happening, if object after object, person after person, vanishes from your life, you may begin to wonder what is solid. You hold out your hand in the night and clench your fist and find nothing except smoke, melting into thin air.
I wonder what would happen if all my lost possessions came back to me. If I were to enter the Lost Property Office at Baker Street and find each of the objects that I had ever owned and lost, waiting, in line. The highchair covered in wipe-clean gingham plastic, the handmade rabbit, the beloved pair of boots, all together like the lost property version of the Last Judgment. Would having these objects back, neatly labelled and catalogued, bring any form of satisfaction? Or is it that I am now more attached to the loss than the having? And what, in the end, would happen to them anyway? In another fifty years or so, these holy relics, the deputies for ourselves, will have dispersed again into a world of eBay and landfill, car boots and charity shops. New meanings made, old meanings lost.
If loss has come too early (and it comes too early for all of us in truth), if loss has come in the shape of death, there are times when you will do anything to prevent the cascade that follows. As a six-year-old, somehow conscious that something was horribly wrong in the house, I would sit for hours, every night, outside my parents’ bedroom, or on the landing, waiting for burglars, trying to catch them. Each night my mother or father would carry me back to my bed. I would lie awake in terror, until I thought they were asleep again, then creep back along the landing. From there, I would look through the banisters, knowing that if a burglar did come in, this would give us all a fighting chance. I would wake the family and we would fight him off together. I was often tired at school.
The invader was internal. It was already inside my father’s body, and it was too late to catch him. But unable to comprehend this, not least because I hadn’t been told, I created my own truth. The enemy wore a striped T-shirt and an eye mask, like a character out of Richard Scarry. He could break any lock, slip under any door.
At times, I still worry about losing it all. I clutch at bits of my life that are all too present – my children, my husband, my friends – and I suddenly believe they have disappeared, or have ceased to exist. I have offended them, let them down, brought them up wrongly. I feverishly rummage through the psychic equivalent of my oversized clutch – so sure that I have lost them, that they are gone for ever. I will be alone. By the time I find they are still there, like a mobile phone at the bottom, or in the wrong pocket, my heart is racing, my mouth dry, tears pricking in my eyes.
I have dreams about this. Perhaps we all do.
The dreams of all my teeth falling out.
The one where I am backstage, desperately searching for the script of a play that I cannot find, and nobody will tell me where it is.
The dream in which I am desperately searching for bags, carrying the children’s bags from one hotel to another house, then running back, realising there are always more that I have forgotten to get. And there are always some left unattended.
Dreams of someone I nearly know, going up the escalator in front of me, or of them floating down a down escalator as I float up the one going up.
But there are times when I am hardened to it all. The bomb has fallen and I have still survived. At these dislocated moments, feeling anything much for anything is out of my grasp. Perhaps it is because I am so busy with my Loss. The one everyone is so sorry for. He is bulky, and leaves little room for anyone else, even when they are willing to bunk up. I have been changed once, when Loss and I fell for each other. I fear the
thought of changing again. What would I be if a day went by without my thinking of him? My Loss will not let himself be forgotten. His smell lingers on my fingernails. He moves almost noiselessly, but if you listen carefully, you can hear what makes him tick. He does not run by clock time. That would be too easy. My Loss has no past. He looks only to the future. Whenever I step forward, he is there, one step ahead, waiting for me, like the ghostly image on a glass plate.
Birmingham New Street to Leamington Spa
— 2016 —
’cause we were never being boring
Pet Shop Boys
The child not-in the buggy gets off at Birmingham New Street, having run up and down the carriage, tapping at the seat backs with the persistence of a death metal drummer. I look at him as he pads down the platform, stopping to pick a discarded lolly stick off the concourse, and think of my own children – and about how mind-numbing parenthood can be.
A friend asked me the other day if I missed it. By which she meant, did I miss the double life, the conquests, the danger. I looked across the table for a moment, taken aback by the question, and by the insight that lay beneath it. The answer is not so much that I miss the danger, as that I dread the boredom. As the clock edges towards the moment of school pick-up, I enter another world of frequent greyness. The boredom of the cooking, the traffic jams and wee-stops, the tipping of half-finished bowls of Weetabix down the sink that have sat on the table all day so the milk has curdled and what’s left has become crusted to the sides of the bowl like vomit down the sides of a toilet bowl. The guilt of frustration, and the boredom of guilt. The boredom when you hear one of them calling for the iPad at 5.45 a.m. and give in, in a way that makes you feel that you have, yet again, so signally failed. And for sure, it is punctuated by small miracles. But perhaps I am not alone in finding myself fascinated by the ways in which domestic life often feels so desperately drab.
The Lost Properties of Love Page 10